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File talk:Map-475plus.gif
Just to fill in some "real world" details about the patch of Land that James has now defined... As he's said, the contours are starting at 475, and going up in units of 5. These are metre contours, so 475m and 5m intervals in the mundane world. 10m intervals in the first regio level etc. Pole bank is at 516m from sea level. Ground scale. The pale blue lines running N-S and E-W are the Ordnance Survey's 1km grid - so the main area marked out fits roughly in about 2 1/2 km north-south, by about 2 km east-west, taking up about 40% of that area. For those used to Imperial measures, that's about 1 1/2 miles N-S by 1 mile E-W, at an altitude of just over 1500 feet above sea level. Pole Bank is at under 1700 feet. Having walked this area in real life, it gets boggy in the flatter areas, such as down by the cottage where there are pools of water, and near the boiling well. The spring there is fed from water soaking off the higher ground, around Pole Bank itself. he soil has a lot of loose stone in it, but this isn't an area of exposed rock - most of the ground is covered by heather and bracken these days. Constructions would need some foundations before hitting bedrock. Overall, it's all easy walking - nowhere steep until you head further north-west towards the edge of the scarp. I don't want to double-guess James's intentions, but my expectation of the steeper versions in the regio levels are that these are where the rock is much nearer to the surface, and hence I'd expect water would run as streams on the surface rather than soaking through below. Given that, it would be reasonable to expect minor streams to gather to a useful size in the areas where it pools in the real world, and to run off from there. I'll carry on my discussion of the effect of all this in the more general discussion of construction... --OldNick 14:13, 11 January 2007 (UTC) :This is excellent insight, Nick. Thank you. Out of curiosity, do you think that the area would be large enough to graze a sizable flock of sheep, or prehaps grow a magically assisted good-sized copse of trees on? --207.190.203.149 14:55, 11 January 2007 (UTC) :Thanks - I honestly don't know enough about medieval sheep farming to answer that. My guess is no. As to the trees, tree-lines were planted around the real cottage (much much later) to provide shelter from the wind, which they do reasonably well, so I would have thought they could be planted in the flatter areas with some work. --OldNick 15:21, 11 January 2007 (UTC) :::On a semi-random note, I found a reference yesterday to Walter of Henley who suggests 2 sheep per acre of fallow land. If the Mynd is comparable to fallow farmland, that gives us a sort of baseline for how many sheep we can support. JBforMarcus 13:13, 12 January 2007 (UTC) This problem is much like the tree problem. How fast can we grow trees to supply the covenant vs. how fast can we grow grass to feed sheep. There are magical means to enhance the growth of plants, so you can probably manage to keep a rather larger number of sheep than is normal, if you are willing to expend the effort. Sheep are good for milk, cheese, hide, fleece, wool, horn, lamb, mutton, etc. so well worth having. :D Livestock are a highly inefficient means of producing food from land. The best means of food production is plant-based, by which I mean everything from simple fields of corn to managed rainforest. --James 16:44, 13 January 2007 (UTC)